Broadband News

UK Broadband Latency - Effect of the World Cup

We have been tracking the performance of the UK broadband network during the
last couple of matches played by England.

As expected, the broadband network copes fine with most World Cup matches,
but struggled when England plays during the working hours. This was seen during
the Wednesday match between England and Slovenia which started at 3.p.m and
resulted in noticeable packet loss as well as increased latency. Although a
noticeable increase in latency has taken place during the first half of the
England v Germany match this afternoon, it has not resulted in significant
packet loss. No doubt, most of us are watching the match on TV rather than via
a broadband connection.

This matches with reports from ISPs that traffic levels today are not
significantly higher than usual. It is also worth noting that the monitoring
system excludes many of the larger consumer broadband providers who do not
provide static IP addresses, so the effect may even be slightly worse during
England matches.